Feeding not Fighting with Fay Adams

A Radical Practice for Transforming Inner ‘Demons’

including contributions from Choden and Kristine Mackenzie-Janson

Online 6 x 1.5 hour sessions.

18.30pm – 20.00pm on Monday 8th February, Monday 15th February, Monday 22nd February, Monday 1st March, Monday 8th March and Monday 15th March 2027.

Prerequisite: MA Level 1 Mindfulness and Level 2 Compassion or equivalent. If you’re unsure whether you have the equivalent experience, please email fay@mindfulnessassociation.net with a short summary of your experience of meditation or other inner work.

Important note: For these practices to be beneficial to you, you will need to have the resources to take responsibility for your physical and mental health while participating. Please get in touch if you’re in doubt and would like support to decide if now is the right time to engage.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Course Summary

The journey of this course is to drop beneath the surface presentation of our inner ‘demons’ to work with them at their root. Inner demons or māras (Buddhist term)  are forces that work against us such as emotions, beliefs, behaviours and habits that eat at us, limit us or drain our energy. The practices offered work by nurturing what assails us rather than fighting or avoiding.

Embodied and Experiential

This course offers a practical, experiential framework for working with inner demons such as anxiety, self-criticism, exhaustion, chronic illness, insomnia, anger and more, helping the precise “medicine” needed for transformation to emerge organically through the meditation process itself, on a deeply somatic level.

Each session will combine elements of three deep dives:

1. Mindful, somatic imagination-based meditation practice
2. Awareness-presence practice (‘resting’ and ‘open awareness’)
3. Inquiry using transformative questions through journalling or optional pair work.

The imagination is an extraordinary resource for transformation when approached skilfully. We will learn how to let it speak to us and change us from the inside, while remaining careful not to solidify or concretise the fluid and ungraspable nature of the mind.

Please note that this course will still work for you if you don’t tend to ‘see’ internal images, many people have a feeling or sensing based imagination, rather than a visual one.

Radical Non-Avoidance and Compassion

By asking the question: What would it feel like if the deepest need of this ‘demon’ was completely satisfied? –  we will explore how struggles have the potential to release if we tend to them in the way they most deeply need. When this happens, we may access the liberating energy of corresponding inner ‘allies’. These are positive forces in the mind, that can appear as energy and feeling and/or as archetypal, symbolic, or deity-like figures, who are emissaries of our inherent wisdom and connect us to qualities such as compassion, clarity, confidence, and calm.

Needs Awareness

Part of what makes this course unique is the attention given to fundamental human needs. We will attend not only to survival needs like safety and shelter, but also to the deeper longings that we all naturally have, for belonging, understanding, love, integrity, and freedom. We will develop a compassionate ‘needs awareness’ that can be called upon as a navigational tool in daily life for our own benefit and the benefit of others around us. Practised regularly, this trains the heart, mind, and nervous system to organise around potential rather than reactivity and fear.

From Contraction to Expansion

The overall movement of this course is from avoidance to welcome, from contraction to expansion, and from inner conflict to a greater sense of aliveness. This gradually opens a path away from the egocentric pull within, toward an open-hearted and more fluid engagement with life moment to moment. It is when our fundamental human needs are met, that our inner world calms down and we are naturally able to embody the gift of who we are.

Course Components:

• Practices inspired by Lama Tsultrim Allione’s Feeding Your Demons®
• Awareness – presence practices
• Tibetan Buddhist wisdom from the ancient practice of Chöd and the yogini or female mystic, Machig Labdrön
• The Living Energy of Needs from Robert Gonzales and Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
• Self-Energy and the 9 Cs as understood in Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• Inspirational stories and poetry
• Neurochemical education from Loretta Graziano Breuning

Week 1 – Radical Non-Avoidance
Turning Towards Inner Demons

Week 2 – The Inner Ally
Awareness, Presence, and Resource

 Week 3 – The Wisdom of Chöd with Choden
The Buddhist Origins of Feeding Not Fighting

 Week 4 – The Hidden Key
Needs and Transformation

 Week 5 – Finding the Medicine
Mapping Demons, Allies, and Needs

 Week 6 – Living the Practice
Integration into Daily Life

A note from Fay:  ‘When an inner difficulty has a stronghold in my body, mind or heart, it sometimes takes an entirely new perspective for movement to happen. This is what Feeding Your Demons is able to give. This shift happens not just on a cognitive level, but energetically and in the body. Often, I finish the practice in a tangibly different inner state to the one I began with and then feel able to reengage with whatever life is throwing at me from a fresh place. I’ve been practicing Feeding Your Demons for many years and gain great confidence from knowing that it’s there whenever I need it. It’s awe inspiring that our mind is capable of such shifts, if we know how to work with it!’